Refloresta

Climate change is directly related to increased vulnerability to fires and the greater severity of these fires. However, changes in land use due to rural depopulation, new economic trends, agricultural regulations, etc., exacerbate the vulnerability of a cross-border space that is predominantly forested.

Both FIRE PREVENTION and RECOVERY after these fires are key measures to improve resilience, and REFLORESTA focuses on both challenges with innovative approaches:

• It addresses prevention by employing, for the first time, Artificial Intelligence techniques to detect vulnerabilities and high-risk areas. This allows for the management of new meteorological, environmental, and territorial variables, as well as the historical record of all registered fires, using data series from the last 40 years. The results will be novel and more precise than those currently available, incorporating weather forecasts so that operatives like INFOCA, INFOCAL, or Proteção Civil can anticipate and even carry out preventive actions.
• Regarding Recovery, the goal is to create landscapes more resilient to climate change and future fires. The approach is also innovative, applying techniques such as hydraulic modeling to minimize ash runoff into rivers and soil erosion, or combining remote and close-range sensing (satellite/drone) for high-precision urgent diagnostics. These allow for the application of new scientific and technical approaches in the design of Action Plans, or drafting them from ecosystem-based approaches to promote the smart restoration of affected landscapes and ecosystems.

In the design of REFLORESTA, the cross-border approach and cooperation are essential, both to harness capacities distributed among various entities in both countries and because each one contributes pilot areas in diverse ecosystems, representative of the POCTEP territory. These will allow for testing the techniques, approaches, and governance, planning, and management tools, and gathering useful lessons from such contrasts.

This innovative approach of REFLORESTA is reflected both in its objectives and in the actions it will develop to address the challenges of the POCTEP Territory:

• Do more with less, acting precisely in the areas where success is most likely, intervening in ways that cause no harm, and facilitating natural reforestation (applying the concept of "Smart Reforestation" and "restoration of ecosystems and landscapes").
• Reduce impacts to a minimum, accelerate recovery, and restore more resilient ecosystems and landscapes adapted to climate change that generate biodiversity and sustainable economic development.
• Minimize the impact of fires on rivers, reservoirs, and oceans, applying the latest observation and territorial and forest analysis technologies to reduce soil loss, erosion, and ash runoff, and to rebuild landscapes that retain water and do not cause flooding.
• Promote a more inclusive restoration, involving Local Communities (in the broad sense: citizen organizations committed to working alongside the few remaining residents in fire-affected areas), so that the ecosystem restoration results are more sustainable over time.

The expected result is better governance with improved prevention capacities and smart ecosystem restoration, enabling more to be achieved with less through a better understanding of ecosystems and greater resilience of ecosystems and landscapes.

The project 0121_REFLORESTA_6_E aims to promote climate change adaptation, disaster risk prevention, and resilience, taking into account ecosystem-based approaches (OE 2.7).

PREVENTION, RESILIENCE, CLIMATE CHANGE ADAPTATION, and ECOSYSTEM APPROACHES are the four demands of the Specific Objective, and they are the four key elements of REFLORESTA, because there is no other way to address the challenge posed by wildfires with lasting success from a social, environmental, and climatic perspective.

The phase of extinguishing a fire is crucial, but it is not addressed in REFLORESTA due to its specificity (it involves many emergency management components, and therefore has little in common technically with prevention and restoration, which do use similar techniques and feed into each other).

Prevention and Restoration have the same goal: the RESILIENCE of Forest Ecosystems and Landscapes to fires.

Both phases are directly affected by Climate Change:

• In Prevention, it represents an added difficulty because the weather is more unpredictable, and its impact is greater. To improve preventive/predictive systems, the EU is increasingly turning to Artificial Intelligence to manage vast volumes of data and understand the patterns of accelerated climatic evolution, and as a result of this, environmental (how forest stands, soils, erosion evolve… all of it forming an interconnected cycle).
• In Restoration, Climate Change is a key variable, as the goals can no longer be the recovery of the original vegetation cover, but rather the construction of resilient landscapes to both new fires (which in reforestations with insufficient maintenance become a breeding ground, sadly confirmed by Sierra de la Culebra, Almonaster, Pedrogão Grande, and many others) and ADAPTED TO CLIMATE CHANGE: for them to survive, reforestations will rely on local nurseries and natural regeneration, prioritizing new plants that already grow in more arid and hotter environments, and therefore more adapted to the future projected by the IPCC of the UN. This Restoration goal can only be achieved by applying ECOSYSTEM APPROACHES both to the diagnosis of fires and to the design of restoration measures. Only by understanding the internal relationships of each ecosystem is it possible to propose successful recovery measures: for example, starting a reforestation only in shaded areas to facilitate the growth of the first trees and allow their seeds to colonize sunny areas; starting with a first phase of shrubs to chemically restore the soil before planting trees; or rejecting the use of heavy machinery where slopes and soil may suffer severe erosion from these machines.

It addresses the following six activities, whose objectives are aligned with the general objective of the EP Program - Interreg VI A Spain – Portugal (POCTEP) 2021-2027 program (promoting climate change adaptation, disaster risk prevention, and resilience, taking into account ecosystem-based approaches).

The cross-border dimension of the project will allow stakeholders to collaborate in a greener, low-carbon Europe that is transitioning to a net-zero carbon economy and resilience, promoting a clean and fair energy transition, green and blue investment, circular economy, climate change mitigation and adaptation, risk prevention and management, and sustainable urban mobility.

The participating consortium is composed of ten partners from two EU member countries, led by the Secretaría General de Medio Ambiente y Cambio Climático.

1. Secretaría General de Medio Ambiente y Cambio Climático (Spain, Main Beneficiary)
2. Agencia de Medio Ambiente y Agua de Andalucía (Spain, Beneficiary 2)
3. University of A Coruña (Spain, Beneficiary 3)
4. University of Córdoba (Spain, Beneficiary 4)
5. University of Tras-Os-Montes e Alto Douro (Portugal, Beneficiary 5)
6. Bóreas, S.L., Development and Technology Company (Spain, Beneficiary 6)
7. IDAF, S.L., Applied Research Center for Agroforestry Development (Spain, Beneficiary 7)
8. AGUIARFLORESTA, Environmental and Forestry Association of Vila Pouca de Aguiar (Portugal, Beneficiary 8)
9. QUERCUS, National Association for Nature Conservation (Portugal, Beneficiary 9)
10. Dirección General de Patrimonio Natural y Política Forestal Castilla y León (Spain, Beneficiary 10)

The phenomenon of wildfires is cross-border, and it can only be addressed through cooperation that prioritizes environmental and technical factors over administrative ones. The INTERREG framework supports this approach, which otherwise tends to be reversed, with administrative concerns taking priority.

In fact, even cooperation between different Autonomous Communities in Spain (such as Andalusia and Castile and León) is not straightforward within the framework of national programs; it is the INTERREG initiatives that facilitate this cooperation.

The technical capabilities and administrative experience are distributed throughout the POCTEP territory, not concentrated in a single location: a project based on cooperation allows the best specialists to come together, offering them a range of pilots with similar starting conditions and specific detailed issues (since the ecosystems are not exactly the same), enriching the results of the project by requiring more technical effort and providing greater variability of environmental, social, institutional, and economic scenarios, which are the key determinants in addressing wildfire challenges.

The differences between the territorial and environmental management models in Spain and Portugal in the face of the same climate change challenges and identical environmental contexts make it particularly interesting to share methodologies and test their validity. As stated in the previous paragraph, prevention, extinction, and post-fire recovery are not strictly technical issues; rather, the governance model and social, cultural, and economic factors are crucial for designing effective and sustainable actions over time. Cross-border cooperation allows for critical reflection on our own models and learning from others' frameworks, while also fostering the necessary exchange of ideas, experiences, and knowledge.

The execution period is 37 months (from September 1, 2023, to September 30, 2026).

The project has a total budget of €2,042,989.53 and is co-financed at 75% by the European Regional Development Fund (ERDF).